A Cavanaugh Christmas (12 page)

The moment she pressed the last digit on the landline keypad, Kait heard a teeth-jarring, high-pitched noise screeching out of the receiver.

She winced as she pulled it away from her ear. Suppressing a few choice words she had for the clerk at the rental agency, she dropped the receiver back into the cradle with a resounding noise.

“What
was
that?” Tom asked, his own teeth set on edge just from the echo of the noise.

“Apparently the guy who abducted Megan left a fax number with the rental agency. What?” she asked when she saw the sudden alert look that came into the other detective’s eyes.

“Whenever my sister Bridget orders something online and she doesn’t want to give out her home number, she uses the old fax number she had while she was working for a temp agency when she was still in college. She never got around to getting rid of it. Maybe the guy we’re after does the same thing.”

She didn’t see where this was going. “Okay…” she drew out, waiting for him to fill in more.

“My point is that maybe the number’s connected to the guy somehow. A fax line he maintains for some professional reasons.” He shrugged. The reason was unimportant, as long as the number was traceable. “It’s worth exploring,” he urged. “What’s the number?”

Instead of rattling it off, Kait handed him the piece of paper with the number that she’d scribbled down yesterday on it. “Here.”

He was already on his feet. “I’ll run it down,” he told her.

Maybe being around him challenged her to think harder. Whatever the reason, ideas had begun popping up in her brain. “Wait a second. I just thought of something.”

He heard the excitement in her voice and turned to face her. “Go ahead.”

Her eyes were shining as she took him into her thought process. “The guy who abducted Megan had to sign some papers agreeing to the fees and all that stuff when he originally rented the van.”

He knew where she was going with this. The same thought had just occurred to him. “And he had to have handled the paper when he handed it back to the clerk.”

“Which means his fingerprints have to be on the paper.” Her excitement grew. “If he’s ever been arrested or held down a civil-servant job, or enlisted in the army—”

“His prints would be on file,” Tom declared. “Let’s go get that form,” he proposed eagerly and then paused to suggest a ground rule. “Can we use just one car this time?”

Maintaining her independence took a backseat to the possibility of a breakthrough. “Sure, why not?” she agreed.

Right now, all that mattered was getting back to the agency before something inadvertently happened to the form the kidnapper had filled out.

“You know,” Tom observed as they hurried out of the squad room again, “we don’t make such a bad team after all.”

The comment made her realize that he’d had the same misgivings about her as she’d had about him when they’d started out.

“No,” she allowed, reaching the elevator. “Not so bad.” She glanced up on the numbers above the closed stainless-steel doors. Currently, the elevator was on the top floor. “Why don’t we use the stairs?”

It wasn’t a suggestion. Crossing over to the corner, she was already pulling the door to the stairwell open. He wouldn’t have dreamed of attempting to talk her out of it. The police detective from New Mexico was flying on pure adrenaline.

As was he.

Forty-five minutes later, after assuring the uncertain car-rental agency clerk that it was within their authority to commandeer the suspect’s application for the van—Tom underscored the fact that a little girl’s life was at stake—they obtained the sought-after sheet and slipped it into a clear plastic envelope and quickly returned to the precinct. They went straight down to the lab.

Tom’s father was exactly where they had left him, diligently working on the fragments of the dress he’d been brought. Behind him, on the right-hand side of the computer screen, dozens of faces flashed by per minute as the program sought to match the stationary photograph on the left.

“Twice in one day. To what do I owe this second pleasure?” Sean asked, looking up. And then he saw the single sheet of paper Tom held out to him. “Ah, you brought me more. Afraid I’d run out of work?” he asked, amused.

“It’s the abductor’s application for a rental car,” Kait told him. “We’re hoping you might be able to lift a clean fingerprint from it.”

It wasn’t like Tom to miss the bigger picture, Sean thought. Nevertheless, he pointed out the obvious. “The suspect rented a car? Why don’t you bring that in? There’s bound to be more available prints on it.”

The problem there would be in isolating the
right
fingerprints, Sean thought. But nothing was ever easy or cut-and-dried. If it was, it usually turned out to be the wrong answer.

“We would if we could,” Kait told him with a frustrated, disappointed sigh. “But nobody’s returned the van yet. Something tells me that it probably won’t be coming back.”

Sean had another opinion. “Don’t be so sure.”

“Why would he bother?” Kait asked, curious.

“Criminals can surprise you. They have their own strange code to abide by, and while they might kidnap, they won’t steal or do something that they think might bring the law down on them more quickly.” Having taken the sheet from Tom, Sean carefully removed it from the plastic envelope. “Let me see what I can do with this. Meanwhile—” He nodded toward the computer on his left “—I’m running that photo for you. So far, there’s been no match,” he said, then smiled for Kait’s benefit. “But that doesn’t mean there won’t be.”

“Is he always so optimistic?” she asked Tom as they walked back to the elevator.

Tom laughed softly. “Always. He’s very possibly the most upbeat person I’ve ever known. He always had a way of being able to find a small kernel of good even in the absolutely worst situations.”

“The only thing good in this case would be if we do find Megan,” Kait said, then grimly tagged on the all-important condition. “Alive.”

Tom nodded. A realist, he was still unwilling to even remotely entertain the alternate possibility. But he was aware that even if they did find Megan in time, there might be a wealth of damage to undo. Damage that, most likely, would take long-term counseling before the little girl could even approach normalcy.

“Why don’t we see if we can track down that fax number now?”

In her excitement, she’d almost forgotten all about that. Grateful for having something to do, she nodded. “Lead the way. I’m right behind you,” she told him.

Yes,
Tom thought again,
we really don’t make such a bad team after all.

As it turned out, the fax number didn’t belong to a residential home.

They tracked it down to a place of business that handled large volumes of reproductive work for other businesses in the area. Disappointed, they returned to the precinct only to be told by Tom’s father that the fingerprints that he managed to lift from the rental application did not match any that could be found in the system.

“So we have a law-abiding abductor who never broke any laws,” Kait said in disgust.

“Or, at least, was never caught breaking them,” Tom pointed out.

“Well, one way or another, it still doesn’t do us any good.” She was having a hard time remaining hopeful at this point. “Now what?”

Tom pushed his chair away from his desk and took a deep breath. He knew when to walk away. Not to quit, but to recharge so that he could come at this from a fresh direction. “Now how about I buy you dinner?”

How could he even
think
about eating, she thought, annoyed and edgy. They were running out of time—if they hadn’t run out of it already. “I’m not hungry,” she told him. “There’s got to be something we’ve missed,” she insisted, saying it more to herself than to him.

“And we’ll figure it out,” he told her, getting up and moving behind her chair, which he pulled away from the desk. “But you haven’t eaten anything almost all day, and you can’t push yourself like that.”

Annoyed, still sitting in the chair, she “walked” herself back in behind the desk. “I’ve done it before.”

“Congratulations.” This time, he turned her around in the chair to face him. “But you’re not doing it on my watch. Let’s go to Malone’s.”

“What’s ‘Malone’s’?” she asked, still not ready to give in.

“A place where it’s too noisy to hear yourself think. Everyone from the precinct turns up there at one time or another to kick back and socialize.” He looked at her pointedly. “You could use the break, Kait.”

She was about to protest that she was fine, that she didn’t need a break and that if he felt he needed one, he was welcome to take it. But while she carried out these arguments in her head, Kait realized that the man was right. She was operating on fumes now and while she wasn’t consciously hungry, she did feel pretty wiped out. Maybe if she ate something, she would feel more energetic again.

At the same time, it occurred to her that he’d referred to her by her first name. When had that happened? She wasn’t altogether sure if she was comfortable with that. But, like with everything else, she couldn’t tell him to stop—because he wouldn’t. The man didn’t exactly take direction very well.

“Okay, if you’re so keen on eating,” she said, rising to her feet, “we’ll eat.”

His grin was just short of triumphant. “Very considerate of you,” he said.

She knew the comment was partially sarcastic, but to avoid getting into an argument, she pretended he was serious. “I try,” she told him.

Chapter 9

W
ell, he certainly hadn’t exaggerated about the noise, Kait thought half an hour later.

There was a great deal of noise, and it rose and fell like the swell of the tide along the beach. The moment she had opened the door and walked into the publike establishment that, she was told, was like a second home to a great many members of Aurora’s police department, the noise had instantly engulfed her.

Seated now at a small table for two with their dinners—cheeseburgers and fries—in front of them, Kait quickly discovered that it was hard to carry on a conversation and even harder to form coherent thoughts and follow them to their logical conclusion. For one thing, she kept getting distracted by a stray fragment of a sentence she’d pick up. For another, people kept stopping by their table for a quick exchange with Tom. She began to think that she was the only one with trouble hearing.

After the last visitor—Dax Cavanaugh, one of the chief of detective’s sons—had left once he’d asked them how the investigation was going—he’d met his wife while trying to locate a child who’d been kidnapped from her private school—Kait had turned toward Tom.

“You like this?” she asked, shouting the question at him out of necessity. After half an hour of this, her throat was becoming sore.

In order to hear her better, and to help her hear him, Tom dragged his chair in closer to her until their chairs touched.

“Yeah,” he answered, then added with a grin, “I think of it as therapy.”

Shaking her head, she looked around at all the people, either seated at the tables or standing lined up along the long bar.

“If you ask me, it’s more like being locked up in the insane asylum,” she commented.

Since she hadn’t shouted the comment, she just assumed he hadn’t heard her, which was just as well since it’d been cryptic and somewhat derogatory. But one look at the grin on his face told her that Tom had heard her. How, she had no idea.

“Give yourself time,” he counseled. But his words fell on near-deaf ears—and it wasn’t by her choice.

Kait shook her head to indicate that she hadn’t heard him. “What?”

Leaning in closer still, the side of his arm brushed against hers as he repeated his advice. This time he said it directly into her ear.

Kait heard the words, but that was secondary to the fact that feeling his warm breath along the side of her face and neck sent one hell of a hot ripple through her body, surging from the point of contact until it touched every part of her and made her far warmer than any heater set on high could have possibly done.

She caught her breath and looked at him, aware that her pulse had accelerated and now went at a rather dangerous, frantic tempo. Even when she’d been threatened with punishment—or worse—as a child, she couldn’t remember it ever having reached this wild level.

What was happening here?

He saw the color rising up in her face. Concerned, he asked, “Are you all right?” not realizing that the very act of bringing his lips practically up against her ear was the actual cause of the change in her complexion.

Unsettled, Kait pulled her head back and pressed her lips together. Belatedly, she nodded.

“Yeah. Fine. I’m fine. It’s just a little hot in here,” she added.

“That’s because of all the bodies in here,” he guessed. “They generate a lot of heat.”

She nodded. It was as good an excuse as any, although he probably didn’t believe what he was saying. Not that it wasn’t plausible, but the man seemed to have an annoying knack of seeing right into her head, at which point he knew that the temperature of the room had nothing to do with why her own body temperature had gone up.

Still, she went along with what he said, absently raising her shoulders in a careless shrug. “Yeah, that’s it, I guess.”

“You know,” he said after what seemed like a long moment had gone by, “in order for that to do you any good, you actually have to eat it instead of just having it sit on a plate in front of you all evening.”

He was referring to her cheeseburger. He’d already finished half of his. The fries that had come with his order were long gone while hers were still sitting on her plate, untouched.

“I don’t like wolfing down my food,” she answered defensively.

It occurred to her then that the detective with the magnetic blue eyes was watching her lips when she spoke. So that was why he could “hear” her while she was having such trouble hearing him, she thought, annoyed with herself for having missed such a simple explanation.

“I get that,” he told her. “But you really should eat it before the turn of the next century.”